Just…One Byte?

The Addictive Allures of Social Media, and the Cravings that Keep Us Coming Back

As a kid glued to the TV on a Saturday morning, there were two constants: (1) My brother and I would disagree on the show, playing channel ping pong until we landed on Spongebob or Rocket Power; (2) Junk food advertisements, with their bulging neon text and maniacal mascots, would leave me craving whatever sugar-dusted delicacy was competitive enough to make it to prime time that weekend. A ritualistic trip to 7-Eleven for Flaming Hot Cheetos and lime green slushies often followed, my desperate sweet tooth finally satisfied.

Many of those sticky slogans still cling to my mind to this day: “They’re Magically Delicious!”, “I’m Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs!”, Coca Cola’s “Open Happiness”, and Tony the Tiger declaring, simply, “They’re Gr-r-reat!“. A promise of magic, of happiness, a product so tempting it could drive you cuckoo in its absence. To my admiring eyes, these snacks and sweets seemed to fulfill so much more than just an appetite. The junk foods were marketed with an air of adventure, a Peter Pan pill taken to forever solidify you in childlike, carefree wonder—carefree enough you’d even slip it into your mom’s grocery cart when she wasn’t looking.

Though I’m no longer a sugar-crazed kid, I still love indulging in these treats every so often. It’s a wonderful, vicious cycle: I crave, I buy, and I scarf them down until my hunger is hushed. The resulting crappy feeling is inevitable. It’s a rhythm I can count on, and even the crappy feeling is worth the reward. And just as it was when I was a kid, buzzwords are totally effective for beckoning me in as a willing customer. Snacks are advertised as “simply irresistible”, touting their “secret sauce”. “Betcha Can't Eat Just One”, Lays coaxes in her sexiest, saltiest voice.

Amongst all the jingles and buzzwords, food advertisers maintain a sense of seductive subtlety in their appeal. Why is it so good? Because “It’s Finger Lickin’ Good”. Or simply because “Ba Da Ba Ba Bah, I'm Lovin' It”. Catchy! I’ll admit. But no real answer there.

Since my childhood, the illusive curtain has been pulled back on some of these products, and though they’re just as fun and satisfying to indulge in as they ever were, leaps and bounds have been made to uncover why these treats are so irresistible.

The answer is exactly what many junk food conglomerates try to drown out with their loud jingles and cartoon characters. In reality, these companies have deployed endless teams of scientists, mathematicians, and psychologists to engineer the most tempting bite possible. Regression analysis, biochemical engineering, and neuroscience are all working together to make us crave that second lick, sip, and handful. Needless to say, stuffy science terms are way less seductive than slogans.

This biochemical brainchild (aka junk food) is such a complex creature, most of us wouldn’t be able to name the majority of additives going into our mouths. No worries—advertisers make it easy on us. They sell the experience, not the ingredients.

There are striking similarities between the engineering, marketing, and consumption of junk food and social media platforms. Like Kellogg’s and Coca Cola, big tech is selling the experience, cloaking the particular additives in ambiguity. When I first signed up for Instagram, I didn’t question why I felt inclined to use it, aside from a desire to keep up with friends and post about my upcoming music. Various platform slogans seemed friendly enough not to warrant any sort of skepticism. Instagram’s current motto is to “Capture and share the world's moments”, and Facebook’s “To give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together”. These apps do an incredible job at touting their potential benefits; how “Gr-r-reat!” they will instantly make you feel and how net positive the experience is, with very little fallout. But while these mottos are catchy marketing, they mask the manipulation under the surface. Turns out, Instagram and Tony The Tiger have more in common than PR companies care to admit.

We become hooked on these systems in our quest for followers, “likes”, impressions, and eyeballs. It’s that “secret sauce” that will help us grow our business, expand our social circles, and rise to our full potential. The terms used serenade us with a familiar buzzy tune: “engagement”, “connection”, and “impressions”. Hearts and “thumbs ups” bounce through the air like candy bubbles, tart cherry red notification bells drip onto our milky white feeds, and view counts rise—a shot of excitement insulin to the chest. It’s culture’s Candy Land, and it’s almost impossible to resist.

Camouflaged by buzz words and emojis, social media behemoths, like junk food companies, deploy armies of scientists, psychologists, and mathematicians to keep users hooked. Armed to the teeth with ample resources, these marketing mercenaries aim to ensure we crave that second swipe, “like”, and subscribe. If only it hit the spot. Hours-long Instagram and Youtube rabbit holes left me feeling depleted, envious, dizzy, and generally spent, wondering how I had let myself get so distracted—the sinful sensation of a Cheez-It binge, but never satisfied.

A scientifically-driven fascination persuades us that sharing our lives with others on social media is of the highest good. We’re so convinced, we feel the need to log in to a town square where everyone’s screaming for attention. Studies show reward centers in the brain are most active when people are talking about themselves—a psychological vulnerability understood and weaponized by app designers. To promote our accomplishments online has become both mundane and a necessity. Advertising one’s happiness is now the equivalent to brushing one’s teeth. We simply can’t start our day without it! What’s more, immediate reinforcement (i.e. “likes”, comments) of our average egotism only makes the addiction loop stronger, and the bar lower. All of this behavior is hidden behind feel-good marketing phrases like “engagement”. In this dopamine-drenched nosedive, it’s no wonder we’re hooked.

To avoid merely pointing fingers, it is critical we also recognize personal agency in regulating our tech use. The only way I was able to detach myself from compulsive use in the first place was to re-engineer my own experience. To do so, I changed my phone screen to black and white, kept tech out of the bedroom, self-educated through books and podcasts, and explored the importance of solitude (examples in DIY).

Nonetheless, it stands true that a gross imbalance persists in regards to personal accountability in product use—and the platforms have gained the clear advantage. They enjoy the comfortable position of a metacognitive perch in relation to their users. Simultaneously, they have become masterminds of manipulation, twisting the narrative to sell their products on the virtue of “connection”, “sharing”, and “community”. This underscores the extreme mental extraction of billions of users—what it takes to achieve the levels of engagement they, and their shareholders, are vying for.

The very business model of social media, at its core, feeds into our compulsive behavior on these apps. Advertising is the beating heart of social media, it’s what keeps the lights on and the blood running. Networks utilize user-specific data to distribute highly relevant advertisements based on how individuals interact with a platform. They are, in turn, paid by those advertisers for their accuracy—a sort of high-tech hitman. In other words, apps like Instagram are able to target individualized ads and content at you through a collection of data points attained through your prior engagement. Though posts appeal to you based on your personal interests, this often means you’re spoon-fed a Facebook feed of outrage, anger, envy, and polarization. As detailed in Stir The Pot, this is because negative emotions such as these lead to the highest engagement, which is of the highest priority for apps. Sure, you signed up for this in the user agreement you didn’t read. Still, creepy.

In a system reliant on eerily precise advertising, we are especially vulnerable to chronic feelings of discomfort, inadequacy, and anxiety—we always want more. Add to that the swelling jealousy that slowly bruises our brains through chronic exposure to everyone else’s perfect social media selves. We paint our feeds with a projected caricature of what we want people to believe our life is like, and while everyone’s keen to the fiction, it somehow becomes fact online.

The very nature of advertising and “influencing” convinces us that what we have is not enough. We are primed to think, through subtext or outward admission, that we aren’t complete without that product. Just like the catchy jingles of Ronald McDonald and Tony The Tiger, we are enticed into believing we’d become happier, better people through those products. Again, a selling of experience with heavy disregard for ingredients. What’s more, specific ads are now especially aimed at your eyes depending on your soft spots. At least while watching TV, you knew everyone had the same temptations. Now, there’s a slogan just for you.

I’m by no means saying all advertising is bad. Sure, I went to a hippie college in SoCal with a chicken coop and communal garden, but I’m not that far removed. But what is specifically harmful about this approach to advertising is the way it drives feelings of need, inadequacy, and want at every single moment of the day. This only fuels the fire of addiction. As a social media user, you can’t simply take a breath from it.

Inspired inadequacy has become the oxygen through which platforms inhale and influence. Now users themselves are incentivized to become brand mascots. And what a marketing mess it’s become. The lines are extremely blurred between authentic content, ads, paid promotions, people pretending to post paid promotions in hopes of getting noticed by brands, posts actively disguised as authentic but paid promotions in practice—the list goes on. What a head-spinning affair, but one you signed on for. And in an increasingly saturated market, the number of Tony the Tiger copycats is exploding. They prefer the name “brand ambassadors”.

In the “olden days” of cable TV, surely an overly excited cartoon mascot roaring at you through the screen about an addictively delicious sugary cereal was nothing to overreact about—you could turn Tony off. Today’s social media airs a constant static that promotes inadequacy and compulsive need as the norm. Compounding the problem, big tech continues to hide behind its buzzwords and mission statements to convince us of the opposite. Behavior modification, through use of virtually unlimited psychological, scientific, and engineering-based resources, gives these companies the all-powerful high ground. Meanwhile, we are locked in a mindless, yet mentally exhausting race for attention at the bottom.

Through the glow, we are being broadcast a message of dependence. Still, I hope we know better. Despite Ronald’s inviting smile, you don’t need a Happy Meal to be happy. Despite “friending” and “following”, you don’t need social media to have a social life. The more you believe that, the easier you can tune it out.